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earendel · #1 Post by **earendel** » Tue Dec 11, 2007 7:58 am

If it's not one thing it's another. Sometimes I think the people who run our IT departments are laying awake nights dreaming up new ways to frustrate the user community, with me as the messenger who gets blamed.

Two cases in point:

1. Yesterday morning over 75% of our users couldn't log into the contracting database that is the lifeblood of our operation. I spent the entire day on the telephone with the database administrators and network administrators in Portland, OR, trying various solutions to get the problem resolved, none of which were having any success. No one could explain what happened, so they didn't know where to start trying to fix the problem. This morning the problem seems to have resolved itself - I haven't had any complaints (yet), but there hasn't been any explanation from the help desk.

2. Also yesterday apparently something happened regarding VPN accounts and authorizations. Normally this wouldn't be a big deal, but we have a "bank" of notebook computers that our people use when they are going to an evaluation board. The sole purpose of the computer is to function as a word processor. However because of security requirements, I have to connect the computer to the local network and the user has to log into the computer. Until yesterday that was enough. However somewhere over the weekend the VPN credentialing system was lost or corrupted. A user who was working at an evaluation board left the computer for ten minutes. The screensaver/security screen went into effect (as it should have), but when the user came back, she couldn't log into the computer. After calling IM, she was told that she would have to reconnect the computer to the network in order to login. Unfortunately she was offsite and there was no way to connect. What annoys me most is that I got blamed for not "warning" her about this, when I had no idea, because IM didn't bother to tell anyone. And they have no idea what happened nor is there a timetable for resolving the issue, meaning that these computers are useless until the problem is fixed.

MarleysGh0st · #2 Post by **MarleysGh0st** » Tue Dec 11, 2007 8:04 am

Ugh.

Santa needs to get you a tee shirt that says "Don't kill the messenger."

Rexer25 · #3 Post by **Rexer25** » Tue Dec 11, 2007 8:13 am

MarleysGh0st wrote:Ugh.

Santa needs to get you a tee shirt that says "Don't kill the messenger."

Or maybe "I work in accounting now"

earendel · #4 Post by **earendel** » Tue Dec 11, 2007 8:14 am

MarleysGh0st wrote:Ugh.

Santa needs to get you a tee shirt that says "Don't kill the messenger."

Yeah.

Speaking of T-shirts, elwing was doing some online browsing at a site called thinkgeek.com. One of their offerings was a T-shirt that would dynamically display whether Wi-Fi was available where you were standing. Presumably there's some imbedded sensor or something in the shirt (RFID chip, maybe?) and the shirt changes colors. There's a similar shirt that displays like an "equalizer" for ambient sound.

MarleysGh0st · #5 Post by **MarleysGh0st** » Tue Dec 11, 2007 8:20 am

earendel wrote: Speaking of T-shirts, elwing was doing some online browsing at a site called thinkgeek.com. One of their offerings was a T-shirt that would dynamically display whether Wi-Fi was available where you were standing. Presumably there's some imbedded sensor or something in the shirt (RFID chip, maybe?) and the shirt changes colors. There's a similar shirt that displays like an "equalizer" for ambient sound.

Yeah, thinkgeek has some cool stuff!

I didn't know that they'd gone to electronic apparel, though. People better be careful about wearing that to airports, before someone gets in trouble like that MIT student who wore that breadboarded name tag.